SES London: analysing searcher workflow

As an SEO, looking at searcher workflow is definitely a very interesting topic to dive into. Starting with trying to figure out exactly who might be searching for your product / service and then finding the need that initially drives them to search, it can be fascinating to go deeper than just looking at keywords based on search volume alone. What I really wanted to investigate was how we can improve the workflow of potential customers, and also how we can effectively diagnose problems and measure how good our websites are at meeting the user’s initial need.

When preparing for this session, I spent a bit of time digging around and looking at how other industries handle optimising all sorts of workflows and found a great definition: ‘identifying the steps in a process, and insuring a seamless transition between each one’. So how does this translate into search?

For this presentation, I chose to break the workflow process down into the following stages; initial need / intent, the SERP itself, onsite content and of course the conversion at the end. Each step along the way presents its own unique challenge, with the risk of losing people if the reason and need for searching in the first place is neglected.

A huge thank you to SES for having me, and also a big thank you to our friends at PrezzyBox for their kind help with GA data.